The true tale of the amazing alchemical miracles and transcendental gastronomy of Ferran Adriá, the world's greatest chef. Or: How to Eat.

1. On the Nature of Happiness

One night last summer I went to dinner at El Bulli, a Michelin three-star restaurant famous for serving some of the world's most curious food. It's a long distance from where I live, so I had to fly to Paris, then south to Barcelona. From there, I drove another three hours north to a busy beach town near the French border called Rosas, then turned onto a neglected, potholed road that led up a mountain—houses falling away, the stunted Johannesburg trees bent like old, shadowy men. On the other side was a forgotten inlet with a few boats bobbing at anchor, lights starring the water—reds and greens and whites blurring on the surface of the Mediterranean.

If getting to El Bulli for dinner required crossing six time zones and a certain pilgrim's leap of faith, actually getting in was even harder, as the restaurant rarely has an available table. I followed some stone steps from a dead man's curve in the road down to the restaurant, a low-slung, whitewashed villa, where I was met by the smell of consommé and chocolate, rosemary and bacon, licorice and seawater. I passed the great lit window through which El Bulli's kitchen appears as a gleaming space-age chamber.

On the other side, forty white-coated chefs moved in a silent, surreal symphony, chopping and sautéing and mumbling to themselves, a ghostly machine. Black-coated waiters poured in and out with trays of strange, brightly colored concoctions: glowing lollipops and wobbly gelatin cubes and a plate simply dusted with colored spices.

Amid the hurly-burly was a short, commanding man with dark, springy hair who wore old black shoes and a beaten red wristwatch. I watched him prowl the length of one silver counter, then turn on a heel and dive in among his pastry chefs, who were streaking what looked to be green paint over transparencies. He corrected the brushwork, then nosed his way to a bank of burners, took up a strainer, and inspected a yellow orb of yolk that he removed from boiling water. He slipped it into his mouth, nodded his approval, then spun to a station at the head of the kitchen to point out some deficiency in what appeared to be a dollop of bright red foam.

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This man's name was Ferran Adrià, and I instantly recognized him from photographs I'd seen in cooking magazines. It was said that he was opening a new culinary path, finding a new sea route, searching for India. And he was brash. He'd brazenly declared that it was over for the French chefs (in cuisine, that's a little like announcing that it's over for Jesus Christ) and that he and his food were the future. From him, it wasn't so much a boast as a truth he held to be self-evident.

It was also said that despite having money, he possessed no home, no car, no television, no mailbox, no stove of his own. During the six months that his restaurant was open, he supposedly slept nearby in a tiny, furnitureless room. The rest of the year, he lived out of hotels or at his parents' small house in the Barcelona barrio of his childhood, in the very room in which he grew up. And like a child, he could be whimsical. Once, he flew to Brazil in response to an invitation from a very rich man who'd faxed a page with only three words: I am hungry.

I'd come a long way for dinner. But my intentions were pure. Aside from all the hype about Ferran Adrià—when asked recently, five of the world's greatest chefs picked him as the greatest of all—I'd heard that his food could accomplish one simple thing: It could make you happy. So how far was too far to travel for that? And, I wondered, what in the world does happiness taste like?

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I entered El Bulli and sat. No silverware on the table, no menu. I didn't ask for a thing, nor was I asked if I wanted anything. A welcome drink suddenly appeared, teeming in a small martini glass, a pomegranate-colored liquid that was announced as a whiskey sour, though who knew what it was. Around me were others like me, bound by hunger, expectant. Everyone had traveled some distance to be here; everyone was about to travel farther. I saw dishes jet by but couldn't name a single one of them. There were white spoons filled with a green jelly and topped with what seemed to be caviar, there were foams of green and yellow and pink, and there was a plate that, by my best estimation, was covered with orange worms.

The warm sea lapped just beyond the patio, and a kind of reverent hush was disturbed by the occasional tinkling of silverware and wineglasses. I noticed a woman sitting at a nearby table. She had put something into her mouth, and now her whole body shook slightly, as if she was having a fit of hiccups. She sat with her head bowed, her shoulders moving up and down, until she looked up at the man she was with. She had tears in her eyes, and when she met his gaze, she started laughing—unafraid laughter that made him laugh, too.

I noticed another man who I'd later learn was an American molecular biologist and a devotee of El Bulli for years, who considered Ferran Adrià a prophet. With each new course, he stood up and somewhat awkwardly switched seats, claiming later that the only way the meal made sense to him was by changing his spatial relationship to the food.

Was this madness or heaven? What kind of food makes people weep or sets them moving around a table like the hands of a clock?

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When my first plate arrived, I was a little frightened. I'd never been to a restaurant where a chef completely decides what you're going to eat and drink. At El Bulli, choices were left to Ferran Adrià, el jefe maximo, and the food was delivered in bits and combinations that didn't look like food at all, accompanied by instructions from the waiter: "This is a childhood memory. Take in one bite." Or: "This is trout-egg tempura. Two bites, quickly."

It came down to a question of faith. And I suddenly felt the presence of this man, Ferran Adrià, somewhere in the shadows, holding the fork in my hand, guiding it to the plate, impaling a mound of caramel-covered, sweet-smelling tenderness that had been introduced as "rabbit apple," and lifting it to my mouth, which, despite my misgivings, had been watering in anticipation of this very moment and watered still, now that the moment was here.

2. On Hunger

If I was hoping to discover what happiness tastes like, I needed company. I'd persuaded my wife, Sara, to join me in Spain with our baby boy and a couple of friends, Melissa and her husband, Carlos, who would help translate. In the months leading up to the trip, Sara and I had lived in the blur of new parenthood. We'd passed each other in the middle of the night, as if underwater, handing off Baby. We'd changed Baby's diaper twenty times a day. We'd gauged every second of our ticking lives by the general well-being of Baby, by every hilarious burp, flickering smile, and pleasing snore. I can't say I'd tasted a thing I ate during that time, nor do I remember a single dream, as meals and sleep came in desperate spasms. So, we'd arrived slightly zombified, our former lives figments of our former imaginations.

It was August, high season on the Costa Brava, and we stayed in the last two rooms available in Rosas, at a German-run hotel, rooms that might have made a good alternate setting for Pamela and Tommy Lee's honeymoon video—shiny pillows and mirrors everywhere, and a shower with glass sides that could be viewed from the bed.

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Out on the beach in front of the hotel was a whole galaxy of overripe, topless bathers and lingam-hugging Speedos that made us feel that much more pale and alien. The arrangement was simple: Carlos, who was the portrait of gallego smooth in a goatee and ponytail, would join me, who was Spanishless, each day with Ferran, who was Englishless, in hopes that we would make it back to toast the sunset with wine and cheese and the rest of our posse.

One night early on, while we sat drinking red wine on the balcony off our room as the sun set on the Mediterranean, skittering in goldfish-orange to the horizon, a man in the adjoining room came out on his balcony, too, in white briefs and a tank top, with his own bottle of wine, just to breathe the warm air. He told us he'd driven sixteen hours to get here from Italy, that his brother, who owned a restaurant in Naples, was apprenticing at a famous restaurant, and that he and his own family had arrived to taste the delicacies of the great head chef who worked there.

"You're not talking about El Bulli, are you?" Carlos asked, and the man smiled.

"He's exhausted," the man said. "Fifteen-hour days, seven days a week. If it weren't for Ferran Adrià, he'd probably go home right now. But in twenty, thirty, forty years, they're going to say Ferran Adrià was the best that ever was, and it's going to be an honor for my brother to say he chopped his vegetables."

He paused and offered us some of his wine, which we accepted. "It's a good wine," he said, poking his nose into the goblet and inhaling. "Not so overpowering. It's a bit of a secret." He admired the label, then said, "If you'll excuse me, I'm finally eating there tonight." Then he disappeared into his room of shiny pillows to prepare for his own trip up the mountain and down the other side to El Bulli.

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We stood with our glasses full of wine, our faces lit a most otherworldly orange, and—we couldn't help it—we stared at the place where he'd just been standing, our envy framing the void, our hunger filling it.

3. On the End of the World

Ferran Adrià often speaks of moments that mark a before and an after. For most, a dozen of these eurekas in a life is a lot. For Ferran, not a day passes that he doesn't assume he is on the verge of yet another one, that the world he's made for himself will simply explode under the weight of the new one rising from it.

His very first before-and-after came in 1985, when he was twenty-three. He was not yet the kind of strange celebrity he is today, recognized on the street or in restaurants or at parties as a modern Willy Wonka, as the supposed savior or destroyer of cuisine. It was this young and unknown Ferran Adrià who was standing in his kitchen, staring at yet another order for partridge. How many times had he made this dish? Hundreds? Thousands?

There was nothing haute or nouvelle about the partridge dish. It was a plato typico, a common plate, escabeche de perdiz, made by every chef at every restaurant in Spain. It was simply an obligation to have it on the menu. The finished product looked as if it had been electrocuted at altitude, in midflight, and then had fallen two miles to the plate, battered and charred. But on this one particular evening, Ferran Adrià found himself suddenly incapable, frozen by some internal pause button.

How to deal with this sad bird? With the sameness of every day, of making every plate again that he'd already made before, by copying, copying, copying the recipes of dead or dying French and Spanish chefs? Wasn't there something greater, some secret waiting for release in this food? Perhaps Ferran Adrià had no right to see the partridge for what it wasn't, or for the multiplicity of what it could be, but if eating is as necessary as laughter or a sob, then where was the emotion in having charred partridge delivered to your table?

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So he began to play with the bird. He plucked the wings and pinched some meat from the bones, which gave tenderly between his fingers. He removed the partridge from the partridge, as it were, and peppered the meat and swirled it with vegetables, some asparagus shoots and zucchini and finely shaved carrots, some leeks and onion at their most succulent. Then, on a whim, he tossed in some local langosta, lobster. Because it pleased him. And without another thought he sent it out to the dining room. A deconstructed partridge. No, a deconstructed, Mediterraneanized partridge. Vaya!

But the greatest surprise came when it wasn't sent back, as the faceless diner put fork to bird and bird to mouth, participated in the deconstruction, and actually liked it.

And with that began the revolution, the alchemy, the culinary miracles. He experimented with gazpacho, vacuuming it into a liquidless, cold dish. When people ordered gazpacho expecting gazpacho, they suddenly did a double take at what appeared before them in a bowl: a sculpture garden of beheaded tomatoes, slivers of cucumber set like juju sticks, peeled whole onions … but where was the soup? And while other chefs certainly improvise from time to time, or as a last resort, Ferran Adrià couldn't help himself. It was jazz music, abstract painting. Dervishly, pathologically, he began changing everything.

One day he got to thinking about ice cream, why it's always sweet, why, when confronted with it, your entire body prepares for that great blast of sugar and cool cream—not an unpleasant sensation, especially on the hot Costa Brava, but nonetheless the same sensation triggered by the same food—and so he set out to obliterate the sameness of ice cream. And he did, mixing a batch, cream and milk and ice, but then, at the last moment, substituting salt for sugar. Vaya! What he tasted in his mouth felt like something cool and mineral, as if it had been scooped from the dark side of the moon.

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Now he saw the whole world in his kitchen: the autonomous march of history repeating history, the tyranny of that repetition. Chocolate: Why not add another texture, another taste to the tongue? He made some rich dark chocolate and smeared it with

Japan—streaks of green wasabi that suddenly gave it a kick, a delicious burn that transformed the idea of chocolate into chocolate of some higher power. Bread: Why not make it explode? After baking bite-sized spheres of bread, he took a syringe and infiltrated the spongy interior with warm olive oil. He saw a simple croquette and injected it with seawater. People put them in their mouths expecting the expected—a little crunch, some chew, air—and were suddenly dealing with a burst and flood, victual chaos, palatal dyslexia, a tilting universe.

The new big bang.

Once, when Ferran Adrià was back in Barcelona for the winter, he bought a truckload of perfectly ripe tomatoes. He had no idea what he was doing. He and his brother, Albert, took the tomatoes back to their workshop, where Ferran dumped them on the floor and impulsively grabbed a bicycle pump. He stuck a tomato with it and furiously began pumping. For a moment, Albert regarded his brother quizzically, and the tomato itself seemed impervious until … it exploded everywhere! Covered in red gook,

Ferran fell upon the wreckage, sifting through it, and triumphantly lifted one shard aloft.

A fine, pinkish spume bubbled along the line where air had forced a fissure. He tasted it, a tomato without body—earth salt and juice, which suddenly disappeared like sparklers.

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After that, the brothers spent the afternoon blowing up tomatoes to see what more there was to discover.

It was air that created this tomato foam, but then how could you make it in the kitchen? You couldn't very well have someone in a back room blowing up tomatoes with a bicycle pump, could you? And also, the foam bubbled for a moment, but then flattened and quickly vanished. The brothers were stymied. Ferran felt that finding the key to making this foam would be like discovering a new planet.

After some experimentation with an old whipped-cream canister, and with the addition of the perfect proportion of gelatin, they finally happened upon it: a tomato foam, straight from a metal canister, that could stand on its own! A fine, floating, airy thing that tasted like … like … some new mesospheric formation they called cloud. And the tomato was just the beginning. Soon there were curry and beet clouds, strawberry and apple clouds. Once in your mouth, they bubbled, effervesced, and evaporated, leaving a tingle of taste. His foam was soon being copied by nearly every innovative young chef in Paris and Milan and New York and made Ferran Adrià famous, as much for striking out a new direction in cuisine as for the whimsy of how he'd done it. But today at his restaurant, less than five years later, Ferran is almost dismissive of those foams, using them sparingly. "It's not so conscious," he told me in his kitchen. "It's just that we opened a path and now that path is open. We may not serve any foams next year. Most restaurants are museums, but not El Bulli." I asked him what El Bulli was all about, then. He considered for a moment, then gestured at the white-coated chefs chopping like sped-up metronomes. "El Bulli is crazy," he said. "It's the drunkenness of all the new things that can be."

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4. Aphorisms from the Professor

"Painting, music, movies, sculpture, theater, everything—we can survive without it," Ferran said. "You have to eat, or else you die. Food is the only obligatory emotion."

"The taste of a lemon is incredible!"

"There are eight degrees between warm and cold."

"You must always eat with two hands."

"I prefer to spend my money on a bottle of champagne at the Ritz in Paris than on a pair of shoes. I'll always remember the champagne. I'll never remember the shoes."

"The tomato is American."

"The prawn head is Spanish."

"In the end everything already exists; we're not inventors of anything. But this is the definition of creativity. It's seeing what other people don't see."

"Laughing brings out the good in food. It's good to laugh. If you don't laugh, you're going to magnify. And if you magnify, you're going to die."

"The important thing is the miniskirt, not what color it is."

5. Concerning the Effect of Tomato Hearts on Wedded Discourse

One afternoon Carlos and I took the long drive into the mountains along the Mediterranean toward El Bulli. Up there everyone vanished, the sky came closer, the sea glittered differently. If it was treacherous to drive the hairpins and potholes, it was suddenly much easier to breathe. Later, when I would ask Ferran to describe the perfect meal, he stressed that there had to be magic in arrival. That it had to be a place hard to get to or somehow earned. That the journey, more than any appetizer or cocktail, would remind you of your hunger.

Now it was time to eat. Carlos and I had been invited to have lunch in the kitchen so we could taste and watch at the same time. We were seated at a wide wooden table before a couple of wine goblets full of light. We were asked if we had any allergies, which we didn't, and then came the welcome cocktail, what the waiter called a "hot-cold margarita." When I picked it up, the glass was partly warm and partly cool to the touch, since some part of the drink had been heated and some chilled. The margarita was like no other either of us had drunk before, tangy and airy, and the temperature difference, the movement from hot to cold, created a tumbling sensation in our mouths, a tequila wave with a triple sec undertow, ending on one arctic, sweet note. We were startled into smiles.

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And though whimsy has made Ferran Adrià famous, one soon realizes that a meal at El Bulli is driven by cold logic, coordinated through the phalanx of chefs at their various stations. Each guest eats roughly two dozen dishes, and if the diner simply rises to go to the bathroom, he can break an almost sacred rhythm that Ferran feels is crucial to the meal, to the variations in temperature and texture that help give his food its character.

"The plate is a song," he says. "If the harmony is too slow, the person who receives the plate isn't receiving what the chef intended. There's a rhythm that's hard to explain, but it changes everything." Ferran's sense of time, then, guides the journey of every morsel from kitchen to mouth, and once there, he wants you to taste it as he does. And that occasionally requires spoken instruction. "The feeling of cold and hot is very different in one bite than in two bites," he says. "Sometimes, two bites makes all the difference."

Because much of what's eaten here seems without context, the meal itself, the rush of these dishes, builds a new context in which tastes emerge with shot-glass intensity from a nebula of cool mists and jellies. The idea is that a new dish will be launched every five minutes, no more than ten seconds after it's ready, and in those intervals between dishes, a guest will experience both sensual and psychic liftoff, to be repeated five minutes later. In theory, this makes the meal two hours long, though often people will linger a couple hours longer at the table.

"We are inviting fifty people into our home every night," says Ferran. "It should be the greatest event of their lives."

The trick, of course, is to translate the ideas of Ferran's fertile mind into living dishes, up to two hundred different ones in a night. Further, each dish must be prepared en masse, then delivered to the table according to a nearly-impossible-to-achieve Ferran standard. And the fear of not reaching that standard is what drives the dizzying, obsessive pace in the kitchen.

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From our vantage point, it was all just an endless rush of plates passing to and fro.

Suddenly, a tray crowded with goodies appeared before us, and another, and another— what Ferran calls first and second and third "snacks," which are meant to be fun and lighten the mood before the main courses. None were recognizable.

There was dried quinoa in a paper cone, and, when I tilted it back into my mouth, the quinoa lightly pelted my tongue and echoed in my ears like a fine rain turning crunchy. There were also seaweed nougat (salty and sublime), deep-fried bits of prawn (so light they disintegrated before they could be rightly chewed), and strawberries filled with Campari (every cell cloying, the strawberries more strawberry because of the liqueur). No sooner would one marvel cease, one of us sputtering, What was that?, than the next bit of Martian food would arrive. It all ended in a strange, caramelized cube that

I lifted with my thumb and forefinger and gently slid onto my tongue. Only after shattering it between my teeth did the object reveal itself: yogurt bursting from its candied shell in a warm, smooth flood.

Ferran shuttled between our table and his capos—the white-shirted generals running the kitchen—and an endless drift of guests that came back to meet him. There was a famous wine critic who produced a rare Japanese spice. Some fabulously rich people shook Ferran's hand and gushed, "You don't see this every day," and Ferran said,

"No, this is every day." A photographer from a Danish magazine, a tanned woman with very blond hair and long legs, wearing a sheer pinafore and a light-blue bikini underneath, climbed onto a table and started taking photographs. And for a second, everything stopped, sighed … then resumed in double-time.

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"Where the hell are the tapiocas?" a capo yelled at the hunched-over chefs on the line. "We're going to get punished here. Let's go!"

It was hard not to feel a little ridiculous, supping on delicacies while people worked at breakneck speed to get them to us. But we didn't overanalyze this because the main dishes, fourteen in all, began to arrive. And each dish was … was … how to explain it?

In Ferran Adrià's restaurant, nothing is for certain once his food crosses the Maginot Line of your mouth. He feeds you things you never thought existed, let alone things you'd think to eat: a gelatin with rare mollusks trapped inside (it was so odd, the cool, sweet jelly parting for salty pieces of the sea, that it tasted primordial and transcendent at once), tagliatelle carbonara (chicken consommé solidified and cut into thin, coppery, pastalike strands that, once glimmering on the tongue, dissolved back into consommé that poured down the throat), cuttlefish ravioli (the cuttlefish sliced with a microtome, then injected with coconut milk, another sweet explosion that seemed to wrap the fish in a new sea), rosemary lamb (we were told to raise sprigs of rosemary to our noses as we munched on the lamb, both of us now with rosemary mustaches, the smell of rosemary becoming the lamb as if the two were the same) … and it went on like this.

I will tell you: We were happy. We were served an eighty-year-old vinegar pooled in an apple gelatin with ginger, and vinegar has never tasted so gentle, so perfectly between sweet and sour, with a trace of gin, so unlike vinegar that it redefined vinegar. I would drink that vinegar every day, if I could, to start every day with a little pucker and smile. There was dessert, too … a first dessert and a second dessert and then more snacks. At the end, when we went to him, Ferran waved us off, saying, "Today you eat, tomorrow we'll think."

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And so Carlos and I drove back down to Roses and the hotel. The clouds appeared as purple-lit dirigibles, and more light beamed across the sea in silver flickers. When we returned to the hotel and took a swim (the sea tasting like something made by Ferran Adrià) and sat down for some sangria on the terrace, when I tried later to describe the meal to Sara, I couldn't find any words. There were no words that came to mind. But I tried.

I tried to describe one dish in particular, an amazing, complicated thing, really. It was monkfish liver served as a pâté and, floating on top of it, a froth of soy foam. On the plate, in orbit around this foie-soy structure, were quasars of orange, lemon, grapefruit, and, finally, what stopped me, what I startled at, tomato hearts. They were just the guts of the tomato, really, its oozing seeds and essence.

What I meant to tell my wife, but couldn't, was that when I ate the substance of liver and foam with some grapefruit and then scooped the heart, naked and dripping, into my mouth, I'd felt, in all my happiness and weird heady lightness, something else, too: an undercurrent of impermanence, some creeping feeling of danger and fear. All of it in this single bite that slid down my throat. I might have grimaced as I swallowed it; I might not have. But when I looked up, I met the gaze of Ferran Adrià, who stood across the kitchen, watching, and I wondered whether he thought I didn't like what I was eating. Or whether he knew exactly what I felt, had searched for that expression on my face, because he knew what it was to eat a heart, and he'd felt it, too.

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6. On the Ahistorical Conundrum of the Great Ferran Adrià

It's as likely that he'd have ended up a car mechanic as a chef, if not for the pleasure of beer. After quitting high school and moving to Ibiza with the full intention of living the party life, Ferran took a job washing dishes to pay for his cervezas. Up until that moment, he had subsisted on beefsteak and french fries. That's all he ate; that's all he wanted.

But working in restaurants, he slowly indoctrinated himself into a multifarious world of taste, its bombast and truths. And by the time Ferran left Ibiza at twenty, he had decided: He would learn everything he could about cuisine, and through cuisine he would know everything about the world. He read Escoffier and Larousse. He made the recipes of dead chefs with zealous devotion. He had a friend who was working up the coast from Barcelona at El Bulli, a two-star restaurant with a loyal if somewhat limited clientele, and, in 1983, he hitched three hours north with the thought of picking up some quick money. Eighteen years later, he's still here. Ferran is thirty-nine now and no more than five foot five in black stocking feet.

He has a hairless chest with no muscles, exactly, and a bulging belly. (This vision appeared to me one day when he changed into his chef's whites without thought of anyone else in the room.) He does, in fact, possess almost nothing of his own. He never cooks for himself or friends and always eats out, usually traveling the world two or three times a year to eat, except for Christmas Day, when he cooks with his brother for their parents at home. Though he could buy them a Mercedes, and would, they don't want one. It would change the context of their lives, he says, and they're happy with their lives.

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In the kitchen, Ferran Adrià is demanding, withering, Napoleonic. His dissatisfaction may manifest itself like a flash thunderstorm. But he's almost preternatural to watch, like Picasso captured on film, changing a strawberry to a rooster to a woman in a few brushstrokes.

Even now he dreams of a day when a restaurant will be less a museum (serving the same, same, same) than an experiment (serving the new), when a computer screen will bring the revolution into all of our homes, Ferran greeting us after work with a fifteen-minute recipe for his chicken curry, a succulent, deconstructed confusion of solid curry and liquid chicken that turns chicken curry on its head.

And yet, it's odd: For being one of the most self-actualized men I've met, he is also one of the most ahistorical. When I asked him to describe the best meal he'd ever eaten, he said he erases his memories so he doesn't live for a moment he can never bring back. When I asked about his grandparents, he could recall nothing about them. "I think my grandfather died in the Spanish Civil War," he said. "Ten times—ten times I've been told, and ten times I've forgotten. Since I didn't know him, it's as if he never existed."

When I suggested that it's a bit strange not to know the first thing about your grandfather but then to be able to quote a recipe by Escoffier from 1907, he said, "Not at all. My life is kitchen, kitchen, kitchen. History doesn't interest me, the kitchen does."

Politics? "I'm in the center. It doesn't play into my life."

Religion? "Do I pray when someone's sick? Yes. Otherwise, no."

Hobbies? "Hobbies?"

Mentors? "I came as a virgin to the kitchen."

When I asked if it troubled him when people didn't understand the invention and game of his cuisine, he said, "Some people come here and see God; a few come and see the devil. The truth is relative."

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The truth is relative? "I mean that only the tongue tells the truth. History doesn't tell it, religion doesn't. All that concerns me really is what the food tastes like. I am the chef, so I have to ask: Does it amaze me? Is there a before and after? If there is, then good. Let's eat."

7. On Taste

"The difference between a grand chef and a magical chef," Ferran said, as we whizzed down the mountain, "is that a magical chef knows not just what he's eating, but how to eat."

"And how does a magical chef eat?" Carlos asked. Ferran's eyebrows rose at that, and an "Ahh" passed his lips. Then he grinned and said, "You are about to see."

We had asked Ferran to pick his favorite place for lunch in Roses. He had us park and led us down an alley that spilled into another alley that opened onto a walking street outside a place called Rafa's. The restaurant, named after its owner, was a simple, traditional, open-air seafood grill with wooden tables. And Rafa himself seemed plainly hungover. While we sat, he disappeared into the back, then reappeared with a red bandanna that he wrapped deliberately around his head, ears jutting out. And once he'd knotted it, he was suddenly transformed. "Okay," he said in a gruff voice. "Okay." Samurai Rafa.

"There's nothing like this place," said Ferran, pleased. When the waitress read the day's menu, when she was through reciting twenty or so items, Ferran looked at her and simply said, "Yes," and then clarified, "Yes, all of it. A little bit of all of it. And whatever else the chef has." She looked over her shoulder at Rafa, who nodded slightly and winked. And then the dishes came, each plato reflecting the way food has been served in Catalonia for hundreds of years. Tomatoes slathered on peasant bread. Sliced prosciutto on a plate. Succulent anchovies, lightly peppered, in olive oil. A small mountain oftallarines, tiny, buttery clams that we pried from their shells with our tongues, the empty shells piling like fantastic, ancient currency.

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With each dish, Ferran distinguished himself, for the act of eating was a full-on, full-contact orgy. His mouth, with its thin, quick lips and athletic tongue, worked frenetically. And at times, he didn't just eat the food, he wore it. He took the fresh prosciutto, fine, bright prosciutto that smelled like … well, like sex … and rubbed it on his upper lip (the same as sniffing wine, he said, or eating lamb with a sprig of rosemary beneath your nose). His fingers were soon bathed in olive oil and flecked with pepper, dancing quickly from plate to plate, so quickly, in fact, that our own fingers began to dance for fear that the food would vanish.

Platos came and went. Crustaceans arrived, various shimmering shades of orange, pink, and purple, just scooped from boiling water, with waggling antennae. Ferran picked up a prawn, one about the length of his hand, that looked like a shrunk-down lobster. Its shell was covered on the outside with small white eggs (a prawn that I would have studiously avoided altogether), and he began to lick the eggs with such ferocity that I decided I must have been missing something important and went digging for an eggs-onshell prawn myself.

While I don't consider myself a delicate eater, next to Ferran I felt effete as hell. Particle by particle, cell by cell, he imbibed and inhaled and ingested until particle by particle and cell by cell he seemed changed by the food itself. Even when he sipped his cold beer, it was as if he were gulping from a chalice, washing everything clean. Now he held his prawn before me, its creepy black eyes staring into mine, and asked what it looked like. Face to face with the prawn, I was speechless. "It's intimidating, it's scary, it's prehistoric," Ferran said for me. "But in this context, it's normal. For generations, we've been eating prawns. If tomorrow someone puts a spider on the plate, then everyone's going to say it's crazy. But I don't see the difference. For you to understand what the ocean is, you have to understand something that Americans would think is crazy. You have to suck this …"

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He suddenly tore the head of the prawn from its carapace and held it in the space between us. "You mean the head?" I said, stating the obvious, stalling for time, processing a simple thought: I don't think I want to eat the head. It doesn't seem like something I want to eat.

"Yes, the head," said Ferran. "If I can describe in one word the taste of the sea, it's sucking the head of this prawn. At home, my parents sucked the head. I tasted it and comprehended it. Just suck it."

He took the head, put the open end to his lips, and crushed the shell until everything in it (brain and viscera, bits of meat and shell) had been expelled into his mouth, caramel-colored liquid dribbling down his chin. He savored it for a long moment, his eyes closed, and he seemed to have reached some kind of ecstasy. When he opened his eyes, it was my turn. I started tentatively, but there was no tentative way to crush a prawn head and suck it dry, so I just began crushing and slurping, juice running down my chin now. It was a profound and powerful taste, oddly sublime, the thick liquid; the essence of this thing was, yes, salty, but also deeply evolved. It was cognac and candy, bitter and sweet, plankton and fruit. It was the whole chemical history of the world in one bite.

"This is taste," said Ferran. "Not the taste, it is taste. You can't explain this."

He went on. "In a restaurant like this, we can eat the head. Spanish people find it provocative. They have an affection for it," he said. "At El Bulli, no, people are not prepared to eat the head. Ninety-nine percent of the people won't eat the head. It's not permitted in high cuisine." He took another prawn in his hand, pulled off the head, and crushed it. This time the caramel-colored liquid pooled on the plate before him.

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"But if I pour this over food in my kitchen, I've changed the context. I can do this and people will eat it. People will eat it and taste the Mediterranean. This is what I look for. This is what I search for. This potency. Double the potency. The depths of the sea …" He sat back for a moment, considered. Then he reflexively leaned forward, swiped a finger through the puddle of prawn nectar, brought it to his mouth, and licked it.

"Magico," he said.

8. Aphorisms from the Professor, Sequel

In the kitchen, scribbling in a notebook marked SISTEMA CREATIVO: "Anarchy is fine but only after logic."

Before we said goodbye one night: "There's more emotion, more feeling, in a piece of ruby-red grapefruit with a little sprinkle of salt on it than in a big piece of fish."

To me, spoken conspiratorially: "The perfect meal: Have a reservation so that you can look forward to being there. In a secluded place, where there's a certain magic in arriving. Four people, everyone on a level playing field gastronomically. There shouldn't be a leader. Equals. When the food starts coming, concentrate on the dish, then speak about the dish. You have to laugh a lot. For me, it would be better to go with my partner because I like to have a woman by my side."

At the end: "Until I can serve an empty white plate on a white tablecloth, there's a lot to be done."

9. On Mexico

During my August sojourn at El Bulli, Ferran invited me to return to Barcelona in the winter to watch him, his brother, and a third young chef, Oriol, at the workshop, where during their off months, they like to experiment wildly. It is located in a very old building in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona just off the Ramblas, which, when I arrived, was brightly lit with Christmas lights. I climbed a worn stone staircase that led through an enormous set of carved wooden doors, and then the workshop appeared like a modernist's dream: a cool, high-ceilinged space with pine floorboards and white walls and Omani rugs. Upstairs, a library houses hundreds of cookbooks, as well as everything—shelf after shelf—that's been written by or about Ferran Adrià.

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From a balcony on the second floor, it's possible to look down on the kitchen as if from a luxury box, witnessing the consternations and elations of Albert, Oriol, and Ferran. Albert is a fairer, younger version of his brother, and Oriol, at twenty-seven, is simply a madman, according to Ferran. On this morning, Oriol had just returned from the market while Albert was in hand-to-hand combat with a food processor known as the Pacojet.

It was this device that broke one day in the kitchen at El Bulli, prompting Ferran to see what would happen if they ran frozen chocolate in it, broken. From that came something called "chocolate dust," very fine dust devils of chocolate—a kind of vanishing chocolate, something between solid and air—that Ferran seized upon as a wholly new substance.

The group was working on about thirty things at once, among them "basil cylinders" (flavored ice frozen in the shape of a perfect emerald cylinder, to be filled with a yet undetermined ice cream, perhaps Parmesan), something called "sponge ham" (a complete mystery to everyone), and a bowl of foie gras and apple foam, into which the diner would pour a broth, disintegrating everything to a soup for which they were also seeking a third and fourth ingredient.

"We're going to be much more interactive this year," said Ferran. He showed me a morsel of grilled chicken on a white plate and then seven spice holders (marked MEXICO, INDIA, JAPAN, MOROCCO, et cetera). "With this dish, you decide the end of the film," he said. "We give you the chicken, and you decide the spice." Oriol and Albert had spent much time trying to refine each of the spice mixtures, making sure that a full octave of taste was present in each, the best curry from India or wasabi from Japan, and that each complemented the rest.

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Now it was time for Ferran to try. Oriol and Albert crowded around him as he approached the plate, staring solemnly at the nugget of chicken. He picked up the container marked MEXICO and shook a bit on his finger, then sampled it. He said nothing. Then he shook it over the chicken, the specks raining down in a red shower, and then he grabbed another shaker and shook it, too.

"Look out, uncle, that's salt!" said Albert, appearing stricken.

"Don't get dizzy here, I know," said Ferran, concentrating. He popped the chicken into his mouth and chewed. He stared into the middle distance. His eyebrows rose and fell as if registering a series of gustatory sensations. He considered it for a long time, then after a while longer, he shook his head emphatically … . No. "It's not Mexico," he said.

Albert looked flabbergasted. "For me, it is!"

"It's not. You taste tomato, cilantro, but it's not Mexico."

"It's my Mexico," said his brother.

"It needs more, but I won't call that Mexico."

Both brothers glared at the plate, at the specks of red spice left on the white porcelain. Disappointment lingered for a moment, then suddenly it was converted to forward motion again. Ferran cocked his head, then Albert did, too, noticing his brother's shifting mood.

"That would taste good on clouds," Ferran said. "You'd taste the spices individually, eating it off a cloud. Try India on that. Let's try it!"

Albert pushed Oriol toward the refrigerator, Oriol produced a bowl of apple foam that he'd made for the foie soup and dolloped some into a bowl, Albert shook India onto the highest peaks of the lather, and Ferran spooned it up. Though there was nothing solid in that spoonful, his mouth moved as if he were chewing. His eyes began to light, but still he didn't speak. His eyebrows followed the taste and texture up and down, and when it was over, he looked up. "That's beautiful," he said reverently. "That's really beautiful."

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Albert took a spoonful, and then Oriol. And each had the same reaction, the same facade of skepticism giving way to some new quizzical appreciation for the taste in his mouth, and then a grin. "Uncle, that's good," said Albert. Oriol just nodded his approval vigorously. Now Ferran handed me a spoon, and I tried, too. Each spice of India (the cocoa and lemongrass, the lime and curry) seemed to burn down individually, while the cool apple spread out beneath it, lifting it from the tongue. It felt like the Fourth of July.

Before I could say anything, though, we'd moved on. To a quail egg. And now we were crowded around a pot of boiling water. The quail egg, which was the size of a small Superball, had been Oriol's obsession throughout the morning. I'd watched him crack egg after egg, drain them between brown-speckled shells until he was left with only the miniature yolks, and then boil them for five, ten, twenty, thirty, sixty seconds, each time removing the golden globe of yolk with a metal catcher, cooling it for a moment, and then tasting it—just to see what he got each time. After some consultation, it was agreed that the ten-second yolk was the best, sublime even, somewhere between raw and cooked but tasting like neither, the liquid inside warm and already swarming down the back of the throat by the time it touched the tongue. In fact, Ferran was afraid to do more to it. >Oriol suggested covering the yolk in baked Parmesan, and he crumbled some over it. Ferran let a drop of olive oil fall on it, then spooned it up.

And this time there was no doubt; his response was immediate. "It's a natural ravioli!" he said, nodding, Yes, yes, yes. "We can serve it just like that." He turned and walked away, turned back again. He could hardly contain himself. Again, everyone tried.

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"That's it," he said, on the verge of levitation. "We can try other things with it, but that's it!" He turned to me. "This is when I'm happiest. Finding the egg."

And here's what it tasted like: It tasted like a first—the first time you dove into an ocean wave or made something good or touched her lips. The first time you jumped from fifty feet, that feeling in the air when you forgot the gorge was beneath you, air and sun rushing, and you kept falling, and you opened your eyes and you were in the bright, underwater lights of a kitchen in Barcelona before an elfin man with hair springing from his head, quail yolk in your belly, and you could think of only two words to say, but you said them at least two times before you stopped yourself.

"Thank you," you said, laughing. "Thank you."

10. On the Pleasures of the Table

On the last of our August days in Spain, Ferran said simply: Bring your wife and arrive by nine. Of course, I did as told. Being here had done our family good. We had swum.

We were tan. Back home, phones were ringing, bills were piling, office workers were shooting each other dead, but the higher we climbed the mountain, the easier we could breathe again. It was the simplest thing.

Ferran had reserved us a table on the patio, beneath a stone arch and a nearly full moon. Even before the meal began, we experienced the odd sensation of being alone for the first time in many months, without Baby. The calm was almost exotic.

I had no doubt that somewhere back in the kitchen, Ferran knew everything that transpired at our table. While I at least had some vague sense of what might be coming,

Sara was a neophyte. We barely got past "a childhood memory" (the dried quinoa) before she was smiling. By the time we spooned up our "cloud of smoke," we were both simply untethered from any concerns but those of the table. Taste became our cynosure, night a thing to be eaten with stars and moon. Ferran Adrià revealed himself in every bite now.

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"It's as if he's climbed inside my mouth," Sara said, laughing, taking a second nibble of trout-egg tempura, caviar grazing her lip and disappearing on her tongue.

"Is that good or bad?" I asked.

"It's good and better," she said. "But it's … disorienting. To have someone in your mouth, which is fine by me because really, it's"—her face brightened—"sofantastic."

Next, in a rush, came corn ravioli with vanilla, wasabi lobster, sea urchin with flowers of Jamaica—each one of these dishes weaving the unexpected with the vague outline of something we recognized. At some point, I'll be honest, I ceased to actually taste the food so much as feel it through Sara, who for the first time in months was no longer someone I passed at 3:00 a.m., but my wife, sitting across a table in a pink sundress, lit by a candle, hair falling to her shoulders, lifting a little against gravity. She closed her eyes, letting Ferran's chocolate dust settle and liquefy in her mouth.

And what did happiness taste like? Let me tell you. It tasted like seaweed and air. It tasted like watching your wife shorn of worry or care. It tasted like watching her face pass through every expression of surprise and mirth on the high road to euphoria, eating delicacies that she'd never eaten before, that exist nowhere else on earth.

Afterward, having finished champagne, having discussed nothing but food, having sat there until the restaurant was nearly empty and the moon had reached its apex and begun its descent again, we went to find Ferran, but he was nowhere to be found.

Somewhere down in the real world our baby boy was sleeping, and we were told Ferran had gone to bed, too, up in his furnitureless room. It was possible. Or maybe he was respectfully absent, so as not to be embarrassed by what would have been our inevitable gushing. Either way, his nonpresence here was strange. His kitchen was silent and empty, the counters gleaming. The Pacojet sat unplugged in the corner; the silver foam canisters stood neatly in a row.

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I imagined him in his room then, his head on a pillow or bent quietly over a book, his ever-moving mouth silent, his ever-darting eyes giving in to night, the sorcerer at rest.

Of course he'd had no intention of checking with us after our meal. After all, what was he going to do with our happiness? It was ours. And so we kept it to ourselves as we traveled back down the mountain, passing the Johannesburg trees that made their own music in the wind, passing through the night into town, to our sleeping baby boy and each other, our world having ended and begun again.

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